Ottoman Imperial Diplomacy

A Political, Social and Cultural History

Dogan Gurpinar

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857734563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mediorientale

The Ottoman Empire maintained a complex and powerful bureaucratic system which enforced the Sultan's authority across the Empire's Middle-Eastern territories. This bureaucracy continued to gain in power and prestige, even as the empire itself began to crumble at the end of the nineteenth century. Through extensive new research in the Ottoman archives, Dogan Gurpinar assesses the intellectual, cultural and ideological foundations of the diplomatic service under Sultan Abdulhamid II. In doing so, Ottoman Imperial Diplomacy presents a new model for understanding the formation of the modern Turkish nation, arguing that these Hamidian reforms- undertaken with the support of the 'Young Ottomans' led by Namik Kemal- constituted the beginnings of modern Turkish nationalism. This book will be essential reading for historians of the Ottoman Empire and for those seeking to understand the history of Modern Turkey.

CHAPTER 1

NATIONALISM AND THE ANCIEN RÉGIME: POLITICS OF THE TANZIMAT

Nationalisms

This chapter aims to situate elusive concepts such as modernity, elites, nationalism, and proto-nationalism before delving into the ideological/intellectual/cultural formations of the late Ottoman bureaucracy and diplomatic establishment, and the making of modern Turkey.

The early theories of nationalism perceived nationalism as an “idea”. After all, this was the time when social sciences were conceived as an outer reach of humanitas, an activity related to the reflection on the world and the self. One of the foremost classical studies of nationalism within this paradigm was penned by Elie Kedourie, who commenced his book by blatantly arguing that, “nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century”¹ by the German romantics. Given that Kedourie reflected the attitude of pre-World War English conservatism, he was troubled by the endorsement, popularization, and spread of this continental fiction, which he considered an avoidable misfortune:

The attempt to refashion so much of the world on national lines has not led to greater peace and stability. On the contrary, it has created new conflicts, exacerbated tensions, and brought catastrophe to numberless people innocent of all politics. The history of Europe since 1919, in particular, has shown the disastrous possibilities inherent in nationalism. In the mixed area of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, empires disappeared, their ruling groups were humbled and made to pay, for a time, the penalty of previous arrogance…What can be said with certainty is that the nation-states who inherited the position of the empires were not an improvement. They did not minister to political freedom, they did not increase prosperity, and their existence was not conducive to peace.²

However, Kedourie’s particularistic explanation remained a minority view. “The twin founding fathers” of the academic study of nationalism, Carleton B. Hayes and Hans Kohn,³ who began to write after World War I and in the age of the emergence of numerous new nation states in Central and Eastern Europe,⁴ argued that nationalism was by its very definition a modern concept and located it within a historicity. “Nationalism, as we know it, is a modern development. It has had its origins and rise in Europe, and through European influence and example it has been implanted in America and all other areas of Western civilization. But it is no longer peculiar to the Christian West.”⁵ Within the modernist paradigm of the time, they tacitly assumed that the diffusion of nationalism (like any development in history) was inevitable. For them, nationalism was inherent in the making of the modern world and the modern imagination. This is not because they upheld nationalism. On the contrary, Hayes saw nationalism as a pathology inexplicable within a rational view. For him, nationalism was an irrational outburst and an enigma/deviation of modernity. Although he was one of the first scholars to attest to the bleak nature of the nineteenth century underneath the disguise of the glamour of progress,⁶ he viewed this undercurrent as a deviation from the main track and triumphal march of modernity. In other words, his critical/relatively pessimistic approach to modernity did not lead him to question the triumphalism or the myth of modernity, but he judged nationalism a digression.

Later scholars of nationalism distanced themselves from Kedourie, denied any room for contingency in history, and pursued the path of Hayes and Kohn. The modernization school, which was an offshoot of structural functionalism, treated the course of modern history and the emergence of the modern society/social organization as an institutionalization of a mechanistic body, which allowed no room for agency and meaning. Talcott Parsons, the founder of structural functionalism, perceived the idea of nation and nationalism as an instrument of social needs: “At one extreme, the principal content of the normative order may be considered more or less universal to all men…At the other extreme, both government and the normative order may apply only to a particular small community. Within the broad range of variation between these extremes, modern societal communities have generally taken a form based upon nationalism. The development of this form has involved both a process of differentiation between societal community and government and a reform in the nature of societal community, especially with respect to membership.”⁷ Thus, he and the adherents of his paradigm dismissed anything fuzzy and uncanny in nationalism. For them, nationalism was an inevitable and indispensable outcome of modernity. It was viewed as intrinsic to modernity and an indispensable element of modern social organization, functional in the establishment of the capitalistic modern society. In his The Social System, Parsons related nationalism with industrialism: “The connection between the development of industrialism and of nationalism is well attested. Soviet Russia, in this as in so many respects, seems to be no exception, in spite of its ‘internationalist’ ideology.”⁸ The construct of nation was an indispensable aspect of modern society. In the words of Benedict Anderson: “(within) the formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept – in the modern world everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender – versus the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations”⁹ in the modern age. However, historians of nationalism disagreed as to why nationalism emerged as unavoidable, inevitable, and indispensable.

A classical explanation was proposed by Ernest Gellner. For Gellner, “nationalism is not the awakening of an old, latent, dormant force, though that is how it does indeed present itself. It is in reality the consequence of a new form of social organization, based on deeply internalized, education-dependent high cultures, generally transforming them in the process, but it cannot possibly use them all.”¹⁰ Gellner explains nationalism as a necessary instrument in the transition of humanity from agraria to industria within his periodization of human history.¹¹ Gellner’s impressive interpretation of nationalism renders nationalism not an independent ideology per se but a mechanism to create a nation and society. For him, national formation is a requisite process for the emergence and consolidation of modern industry-based states and social organizations of industria. In short, for Gellner, nationalism is the sine qua non of capitalism, modernity, and industrialization. Thus, it is not an irrational outburst, but a masterfully planned plot to serve goals totally irrelevant to its declared and “official” goals.

Gellner’s modeling of nationalism is highly imposing and instructive. However, what is unpersuasive in Gellner’s account is its all-encompassing explanatory nature. The model is so perfect, so convincing, and so comprehensive that it does not leave much room for contingency and variation. Although Gellner’s general modeling is impressive, his presentation of nationalism as a rational and coldly calculated ideology that was hijacked for ends other than its declared aims remains deterministic, dismissing nuances in its different manifestations.¹² Others also interpret nationalism as a strategy of interest-seeking and interest-maximization, supplying legitimacy for propagandizing for other means, generally particular interests of a class, a status group, or a generation.¹³

A new generation of historians in particular and social scientists in general, however, contemplated the meaning of believing in belonging to a nation and the experience of discovering a nation. With the “cultural turn”, a new generation of scholars of nationalism and comparative nationalism rehabilitated the basic premises of Kedourie and refashioned them within the perspectives of “new intellectual history” and “new cultural history”. Since Gadamer’s Truth and Method,¹⁴ meaning gained prominence as the ultimate explanatory concept in comprehending the complexity of modern society and the making of modernity. In a sense, this shift can be seen as a return to Kedourie. However, the recent anthropological approach, rejecting the conventional history-of-ideas perspective situating “nationalism” as belonging to the realm of ideas, focuses more on the context in which people are forced and constrained to contemplate their identity, their selves, and their relation to the outer world. In recent studies, the principal subject of inquiry has focused on individuals and their appropriation of the outer world rather than on anonymous masses and ideologies.¹⁵ As historical anthropology burgeoned (supplanting the historical sociology of the 1970s and 1980s), the mental cosmologies of individuals (such as the miller Menocchio) became objects of inquiry and interest, and not the abstract ideas that supposedly influenced the masses.

Recently, social scientists and historians sought to answer how a socio-political vision (dubbed as nationalism) may be engendered as an end to this existential quest. Accordingly, the idea of nation may be viewed as inseparable from individuals’ and groups’ encounter with modernity. The birth and development of nationalism cannot be dissociated from the unprecedented transformations individuals (and societies) encountered. It may be argued that nationalism was received by these individuals and groups as a revelation to explain the perplexing and frightening developments which individuals and groups failed to comprehend. Thus, we can further argue that in an age of uncertainty nationalism provided shelter, relief, certitude, and confidence. It provided a comprehensive answer to all unknowns and thus resolved ambiguities and obscurities, a feat comparable to the cutting of the Gordion knot by Alexander the Great.

Recent studies approached nationalism as a constitutive element of modernity rather than a passive outcome of modernity.¹⁶ They did not view it as collateral damage, a side effect, or a bastard of modernity. By modernity, a mechanistic transformation is not implied. Rather, I understand a redefinition of the perception of the relation of man to nature, the relation of man to other men, and of man to society. Modernity is the emergence of a new meaning of personal and social existence. The anthropologists of modernity demonstrated that it is an anthropological encounter as much as a social and political development. The ideas of nation and of belonging to a nation are also corollaries of the drastic alteration of social meaning and existence. This is not to claim that nationalism is a natural and automatic process that comes with the new configuration of the meaning of man. On the contrary, the new structures of meaning were created and maintained, or at least buttressed, by the emerging modern states that successfully filter and shape these structures of meaning. A new interpretation of nationalism is necessary without reducing nationalism to a dependent function of the modern nation state, industrial capitalism, or mass education. The simple question we have to answer is why people tend to feel that they belong to a nation or why they tend to accept/affirm the ideological infiltration of the state-sponsored or intelligentsia-sponsored idea of nationhood and nationalism. For our purposes, we also have to ask the question of why nineteenth-century European intellectuals were disposed to imagine and discover a nation for themselves. After questioning the reality of nationhood, we have to address the question of why the construct of nationhood was so fundamental in the development of nineteenth-century social, cultural, and political developments.

Simply put, we may speak of two different types of nations in nineteenth-century Europe: those nations with existing states and those nations without states.¹⁷ With regard to the first type, a scholar may study how the idea of nationhood was forged around an already existing state. Many studies investigated the emergence of a national idea in countries such as England and France, where preexisting states became associated with a national essence and identity.¹⁸ In other countries, national ideas and a sense of nationhood developed before the structuring and consolidation of modern nation states. A sense of nation was pursued and developed in countries such as Greece and Russia relatively late and in tandem with the structuring and consolidation of a modern state where states consciously enforced ideological enterprises.¹⁹

A study investigating the emergence of nationalism in countries such as England and France would involve a survey of the state and the bureaucracy, because in these examples the fiction of nationhood was forged with the active involvement and vanguard role of the state while the background of this endeavor was already prepared within an ideological setting. With regard to the second category, where the emergence of a “sense of nation” preceded the emergence of a state, nationalism was more or less an intellectual activity and a “curiosity” turned into the “political”. It was a fantasy that subsequently came into political being. The Bulgarian, Romanian, and Czech discourses on nationhood are examples of this category. In the first category, states forged an idea, whereas in the second, ideas appear to have forged states. For example, it was the successful cultivation of a sense of being a Czech (and Slovak) that to an important extent enabled the foundation of Czechoslovakia.

In comparison to the aforementioned models, the Turkish/Ottoman trajectory follows rather an idiosyncratic path. In the Ottoman case, an idea took over an already existing state. Defying the bureaucracy/ intelligentsia dichotomy in the vanguard of nationalism, the conspicuou...